The Super Nintendo. (Super Famicom)
Born in September 1990 in Japan and September 1991 in America, this is hailed as the best system of all-time by many hardcore gamers. The SNES's stat sheet:
| CPU type: | 65c816 (16-bit) |
| CPU speed: | 2.68 and 3.58 Mhz (change able) |
| RAM memory: | 1 Mbit (128 Kbyte) |
| Picture Proc. Unit: | 16-bit |
| Video RAM: | 0.5 Mbit (64 Kbyte) |
| Max resolution: | 512 x 448 pixels |
| Colors Available: | 32 768 colors |
| Max colors at once: | 256 colors |
| Max sprite size: | 64 x 64 pixels |
| Max sprites: | 128 sprites |
| Min/Max Cart Size: | 2 Mbit - 48 Mbit |
| Sound chip: | 8-bit Sony SPC700 |
| Sound channels: | 8 |
Brief History of the SNES: (From nintendoland.com)
When the SNES arrived it came bundled with Super Mario World and has later been released with many other titles such as: Donkey Kong Country and Street Fighter 2. In Japan the SNES is called Super Famicom (Super Family Computer).
A new SNES was launched the X-mas of 1997 in Japan and came bundled with Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. This new SNES had a new fresher look and costed about 99 dollars. Arkanoid, Space Invaders and Kirby´s Dreamland 3 was released with it.
The SNES is a truly wonderful little machine, it has many different "hardware modes" like rotation, transparency, scaling that helps the games to scale and rotate sprites. Hardware modes are special routines that are programmed into the SNES hardware that helps the SNES to make all the great effects in the SNES games.
With the SNES´s many hardware modes and it´s powerful CPU and PPU, it can
easily create huge bosses like this..
Rotation cleverly used in Contra 3.
Before the SNES, in the days of the NES rotation was hard to do because in order to make a smooth rotation you had to make an animation consisting of a large number of frames - the more frames the smoother rotation! Unfortunately that takes up a LOT of valuable space. Now the SNES can rotate the sprite all by itself in realtime which saves lots of valuable space. Rotation is for example used when Bowser turns around with his Koopacopter to drop a ball on Mario in Super Mario World. Rotating can also be used to create courses like the ones in Contra 3 where you see the action from above and the background rotates when you turn around (course 2 and 5).
